Memories
by spooms
Summary: Luffy remembered Ace.


He remembers it so clearly.

Remembers it in the way he breathed, the way his chest rose and fell with each intake of air, they way the corners of his lips would tilt upwards in his sleep. Remembers it in the way he'd talk, his voice caught somewhere in-between a cold, freezing winter day that he'd spent shivering with mounds of blankets piled on top of him and thunder, a rumble so deafening you couldn't hear anything else over it.

Even now, years later when time has passed like sand slipping through his finger tips, he remembers it like it was yesterday.

He remembers when a bad storm hit, can still feel warm arms wrapped around him as they'd huddled together in the corner of their treehouse, old wooden boards hastily nailed together their only protection. Life was different when you lived alone, when you didn't have the comfort of two parents filled with warmth to greedily soak up in the night, when you were scared (terrified) of what was going on outside the sturdy walls of a house built on solid ground.

These days people romanticize it. He hears children yell about hating their parents, wishing they were dead, saying they didn't need them anyway. They seem to long for "freedom", as they put it. To not be restricted by their guardians. (It wasn't freedom at all. It was hell; never knowing when your next meal would be, if you'd have the fortune of stumbling across a wild animal to kill before the hunger pains finished you off. He never really recovered like the older two did; they had eventually grown to be the right size. He was still too small, too skinny, too short, too _pathetic._)

When he was young, a five year old kid with a too big heart and a too small chest, he didn't take things for granted. He inhaled every ounce of food he could get. Hoarded all the kindness he was offered. He didn't complain.

Even when his ribs were aching because some villagers thought it would be funny to abuse the town freak, even when tears had welled up in his eyes because the one person he had grown to trust would never leave him had ran away telling stories of adventure and freedom, leaving him behind in the dust with nothing left to hold onto.

Everyone had left him. His mother (he was told she was a kind, adventurous person with the personality of a hurricane. Has faint memories of arms holding him tight to a warm chest, of words whispered into his hair and lips kissing every inch of his head they could find. Is it strange to miss someone you've never met?) had passed at his birth. His father was gone on what his Gramps said was "personal reasons" but he knew better than to believe that. And his Gramps never visited, just left him alone in a small house he'd paid for since the day he turned three.

So he was used to it, should have expected it, really. It wasn't supposed to hurt. (It did)

Back then he'd had nothing to live for. Life came in faint memories, random bursts of life, like when he had first laid eyes upon a man with hair dyed red with the blood of bodies trailing behind him and a scar across his eye, or when he'd been huddled underneath the roof of a bar on a rainy night, feeling a warm hand lay gently on his shoulder and snapping his head around only to be greeted by the warmest smile he had ever seen and a voice as sweet as honey.

It was mostly a blur besides a few, life altering moments.

If he thinks about it, his life didn't really start until the day he was seven years old.

His life didn't really start until he'd been dragged up a mountain by his Gramps (how dare he suddenly come barging into his life after all these years, yelling about how he would no longer tolerate him being left alone? As if the old bastard gave a shit), until he had first heard that rough but so, so beautiful voice, until he had first met eyes with cold, stormy gray that was quite possibly the most beautiful color he had ever seen.

After that it was as if a switch had been flipped. His life turned from bleak gray to color bursting at the seams of the world in his vision. He suddenly had a reason to live, to not just give up and lay down on the ground and cry. (He knew he promised to meet Shanks at the Grand Line, but they both knew that would never happen. Shanks had just been trying to give a hopeless little kid something to live for, but it was obvious that he'd either be finished off by the villagers or the hunger, whichever came first.)

His life began (and ended) with that boy.

Now he finds it almost impossible to not see _him_ everywhere he goes.

He saw _him_ in the stars, constellations sprinkled across the sky reminding so painfully of freckles placed delicately upon sun kissed cheeks. He saw _him_ in the children who cursed the world as harshly as the world had them, wearing such angry glares as they walked down the streets he couldn't help but double take sometimes, hoping (longing with so much desperation he couldn't _breathe_) to find gray eyes and black, wavy hair.

He saw _him_ in the fire. The fire that would crackle in the fireplace, so friendly and inviting sometimes he wondered if he could just melt into the heat. The fire that would always be in the corner of your vision until suddenly it was everywhere, engulfing everything around it in flame, greedily devouring all it could find until there was nothing left but a boy left in the dark of his traitorous mind, wondering why everyone in his life had to leave him all alone with this devastating emptiness that filled his entire being until he was _nothing._

The boy had left a permanent mark on his soul. _He'd_ been engraved on his heart, never letting him forget (nevernever_never)_ his past. _He_ was a rip in his mind, a scar across his chest, sometimes he wondered if _his_ name had been carved across his face.

No matter what he did, he would always remember. If that was a good or bad thing was up for debate.

He remembered the good things, the rare mornings he woke up before everyone else, catching glimpses of sun shinning though the window and illuminating _him_, making _him_ glow with so much beauty sometimes he felt like he couldn't breathe. How _he_ would whisper phrases that he had committed to memory in his ear whenever he had a nightmare.

But of course, if there was going to be good, then there had to be bad. Like the time he'd walked in on _him_ crying, shortly after **his** death (He remembers **him** as well; he just tries not to. Tries with all his fucking _soul_ to forget, forget eyes that held the sea and a smile that put the sun to shame with it's brilliance, but he never could. It was another death to add to the endless list on his name), and _he'd_ cursed and yelled and threw Luffy out of his room with the slamming of wood against a door frame.

Like when he'd accidentally cut his finger but suddenly it wasn't just a drop of blood it was an entire _ocean of red staining his hands crimson, and he was on his knees and he was tired, oh so tired, and all he wanted was to go home to his crew and fall asleep for years and let that be the end of it, but he had to keep fighting no matter what, even though he knew he would fail, even though he knew that if he lost **him **then he'd have nothing left, but he has to keep fighting, and his body feels entirely too hot but so cold and why is **he** talking what is **he** saying, __and suddenly he's screaming because is Ace is on the ground and he isn't moving, (why isn't he moving?) and Luffy's screeching at him to wake up, he's holding his blood soaked frame to his chest and he's so cold and Ace just **please wake up please-**_

He remembers everything.


End file.
